Blogs

I flew into Houston, Texas yesterday for the 21st Annual Visitor Studies Association conference. This is my first time in Space City, as well as the Lone Star State, for that matter. This morning, I presented a workshop with Jes Koepfler, a fellow Museum Studies grad and my “partner in crime” on the Mischief & Malice: Crime in the Museum online exhibition project (we co-managed this project put together by the University of Toronto’s Master of Museum Studies Class of 2008 using a wiki). Appropriately, we presented Using Wikis for Project Management.

If you attended the ICHIM07 Conference Reception, you may remember seeing a giant, green, ear-shaped, metal sign with a mobile phone number and the words “hear you are” stamped on it in the atrium of the MaRS Collaboration Centre in Toronto. [murmur], a documentary oral history project, created the distinct marker.

The deadline for submitting a program proposal for American Association of Museums, Media&Technology 2009 Philadelphia (April 30-May 4) is approaching quickly. For Media&Technology endorsement, the deadline is July 11, Friday, 2008.

Some time ago – in 2005 – Archives & Museum Informatics launched a survey of museum web activities. We noted then that:

Each financial cycle museum Webmasters struggle
to justify their budget requests. Whenever statistical reports are
circulated someone asks, "How do we compare?" When exploring the
benefits of a new function, Web teams ask themselves "Is it worth the
investment?" Answers to these questions are hard to come by.

[see http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/index.html for the full background]

This survey – the results of which are written up at http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/report/mwbenchmarks2005.html  – was designed to help fill some of the voids in our knowledge. As a first stab at the problem we realise that it wasn't perfect. And things have changed since 2005!

We've been asked to update the survey for a client-group of museums, and thought we'd use the opportunity to ask for input from the community as well. If we're going to launch it again more broadly, we'd like it to be useful to you ...

So, please, take a look at the questions – available as a PDF from http://www.archimuse.com/research/mwbenchmarks/MW-Survey05.pdf – and post your thoughts on revisions or additional questions here. 

During the month of July, 2008, you can follow Netwurker Mez as she explores the artistic potential of Twitter. She's New Media Scotalnd's second Twitterer in residence.

Follow Netwurker Mez's tweets at http://www.twitter.com/mediascot

Anyone else doing fun twitter things?

/jt

IEEE Intelligent Systems
Special issue on AI and Cultural Heritage

http://www.computer.org/portal/pages/intelligent/content/CulHerCFP.html

The PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA were announced yesterday, and steve.museum received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category.

Jennifer mentioned in her blog entry last week that I'll be helping out with managing Archives & Museum Informatics' 1275+ member on-line community at http://conference.archimuse.com, as part of my position with the company. Well, in case you didn't know, we use Drupal, an amazing open source content management platform, to run this site. However, considering how powerful Drupal is, it is admittedly rather complex to a non-techie Museum Studies grad like myself.

For those who are interested in social tagging, or who might have missed the Community Engagement session at MW2008, I have uploaded my slides "Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags" along with audio track to Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/s.mannion/seeing-tibetan-art-through-social-tags/

steve.museum has released enhancements to the steve tagger. you can now:

• share images and tags
• invite others to participate, and
• display your tagged works on a Facebook profile pages, invite FB friends to tag, and see the most popular tagged works of art.

Wrestling the Octopus: Using Pageroute and Nodereference to Manage Complex Node Relationships
http://2008.drupalcamptoronto.org/content/ wrestling-octopus-using-pageroute-and-nodereference-manage-complex-node-relationships

enables complex page / function structure e.g. within each campaign: events > visits > shifts

What’s the right image solution for my site?
Jocelyn Stretton
http://2008.drupalcamptoronto.org/content/what%E2%80%99s-right-image-solution-my-site

a review of some modules available

Build your own social network in drupal
Amanuel Tewolde
http://2008.drupalcamptoronto.org/content/ build-your-own-social-network-with-drupal

some modules to check out to improve social functionality on a drupal site:

I'm hanging out at Drupal Camp in Toronto this week -- listening to other TO-based drupalers talk about what they've done. Here are some notes:

Unit Testing with/for Drupal [development] - Simple Test module
http://2008.drupalcamptoronto.org/content/automated-testing-with-simpletest

zinc Roe is looking for feedback from the library and museum community as we start to map out the feature set of the next version of our book display and annotation tools. If you're interested please take a quick look at A Real Page Turner and share your thoughts.